Posts Tagged ‘Sanitarium’

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game recommendations. One a day, every day of the year, perhaps for all time.

As I remember it, Sanitarium was quite difficult to get hold of once upon a time. I played the demo that I found on a coverdisc but didn’t see a copy of the full game until around a year after release. The psychological horror adventure has been available on GoG.com for a while now and has just been released on Steam, so if you’ve heard the name but never played the game, there’s no excuse not to find out what all the fuss was about. It’s an unusual piece of gaming history with a cultish reputation that perhaps exaggerates its quality, but it’s still worth peeling the bandages back to look at these old scars.

When Chris SmallGods mailed me about this, I was determined to post about it. Primarily… well, to cover old sins, really. Not that I ever reviewed it – Sanitarium only was released when I first inched into Staffwriterdom – but it was pretty much ignored and/or brutalised by the British games press, and slowly climbed to a cult-status ever since. It’s basically – if you squint – John the Baptist to Planescape Torment’s Jesus Christ in terms of the failure of UK critical response of the period. Anyway – this psychological adventure game is now available on GoG. I’ve never played it, but – from what I’ve had grasped from God knows how many conversations about it from friends – that it’s basically Psychonauts if the designers didn’t find anything funny about mental illness. The examination of Lucasart’s influence on the adventure is manifold… but in reducing suitable topics for adventure games to “gags” if probably the most noticeable, were I to be critical.